


The End of Autumn

by BleedingHeartCrow



Category: Destination Moon - They Might Be Giants (Song), No One Knows My Plan - They Might Be Giants (Song)
Genre: Crossover, Mad Science, Other, POV First Person, Paraplegia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 19:02:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5467580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingHeartCrow/pseuds/BleedingHeartCrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The plan is very close to fruition. The moon awaits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The End of Autumn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Healy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Healy/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, and thanks for the fun prompts! I took your aside about crossovers and ran with it -- I hope that it's all you dreamed of!  
> For the record: the "Other" tag is because the narrator's gender is deliberately left ambiguous (and the romance content is pretty minimal anyway). There are no background tentacles or anything.

I promised my love the moon. The world may say what it will about me, but I always keep my promises.

When I first made the promise, under the spreading trees of the Excelsior Academy quadrangle, it was a needless promise. My love was the top of his class in the piloting program, and government assignments were waiting for him upon our graduation. Compared to him, I was nobody in particular, a well-respected but unexceptional engineering student striving just to be his equal. I'd build his ships, I told him, and he laughed and kissed my brow. 

To this day, I'm not sure why he loved me, in those glorious days. It's easier to understand his continued affection these days, even in my current circumstances, but I still strive to be worthy of him. 

Here in my cell, where I work, I work in large part to drown out the memories of the day that his golden fate ended. I chisel my instructions in code on chips of concrete from the floors and walls of my cell; the guards are, ironically, quite unobservant, and it is easy to pass my code-chips through a forgotten drainage pipe to my receiving agent. It's a method gleaned from a detective story I read a lifetime ago, quite ridiculous-seeming at a time, but invaluable to my work now. A demonstration of how one can learn from everything -- but I digress, I digress. I should attempt to keep this final testament short, because I hardly have time to write a life story before our departure.

Unfortunately, there is nothing to be done but summon my memories of my love's undoing, lest my reader misunderstand my motives in the aftermath of my plan. It was a night in autumn, that most treacherous of seasons -- the night of the Academy Bonfire, our senior year. A ridiculous tradition, bonfires, but in those days, we loved the absurd pageantry of it all. Youth! The engineering and fabrication students would build the vast towers of firewood, competing for novelty and ingenuity, and stuff the lot with leaves as kindling. Our schoolmates would arrive by sunset, admire and evaluate our work, and then light it all by nightfall. Always, there would be music, dancing, revelry to accompany the burning. At the time, it seemed so very simple. I didn't know then what simple was, before cells, before the streamlined perfection of _my plan._

Why my love decided to climb a bonfire tower, I'll never know, and he'll never say. Was he possessed by Icarus, lured by flame and smoke to try and touch the sun? Or was it simply the alcohol? (As a scientist, I suspect the alcohol. As a lover, I prefer the poetic image. You understand, surely.) An athlete at the height of his power, he climbed and climbed up the stack of dry wood, leaves already smoldering underneath him. For one glorious moment, he surmounted the tower, crowning our greatest engineering achievement -- and then a beam slipped, clattered to Earth, and he followed it. He fell long enough for me to run towards him, as if I could somehow catch him. I was foolish. Momentum can't be arrested that way, even if I were quick enough to be underneath him as he fell. We would have both been broken.

The beam broke his back at T7, a lower thoracic vertebra, low enough to spare his upper body from paralysis but take his legs. Such fine points meant nothing to me until I began my research, a few months after the accident. By then he'd withdrawn from the Academy, of course, and was under full-time care of a reputable hospital -- but "reputable" was only a code-word for "mediocre," and I intended to do better, even if I had to learn biology from first principles. My teachers had always told me I had a fine mind, and at last it had found its purpose in life! My professors looked at me askance, yes, but even my engineering work improved. I had unlocked my secret capacities at last. 

Graduation came and went in a haze, and I rented a residential/laboratory facility in which to continue my work. My love's letters urged me forward; the hospital was dismal, and he wanted a cure, not just the ineffective "therapies" that they offered him. It was only then that I learned the terrible truth about biology. Living beings are damnably _inconsistent,_ and however promising my formulations and implants, they suffered rejection after rejection. I needed complete consistency, and rats were simply inadequate. I regret the kidnappings, but else was I to do? They were only as needed, and soon they confirmed that biology had failed us. When I had to flee, I hardly regretted what I left behind.

I returned, then, to my engineering education, there in the suburban enclave with its entirely adequate enclosed shed. If I could not cure my love with medicine, I could cure him with engineering -- and give him the moon in the process. The ship I've designed augments and ameliorates his functional losses perfectly, and the piloting module detaches to allow for movement outside the ship, in the moon colony we'll settle. It's flawless, and if I'd only had a few more years to work, we would already be on the moon. How was I to know that tinkering with a power system in the front room would have my neighbors summoning the police, or that the police in different states could so readily cross-check their records? They gave me only a few weeks to build and program my agents. I didn't resist arrest, of course; I didn't need to.

My agents are robotic, of course, climate-resistant and with a sub-sentient but entirely functional AI. The first generation are barely the size of a soup can, but they are programmed to self-replicate, every generation slightly larger. The youngest of them are more than large enough to take and process my programmed concrete-chip orders, build my ship, engineer the pilot module... and drive a taxi to the hospital room where my love languishes, waiting for me. Once he's in his piloting module and the worker-agents are on board, one will be large enough to smash the concrete and carry me home. The plan is flawless.

(No, I stand corrected. The plan has one flaw: that my neurological implant was removed when I was placed into solitary confinement. I suppose the scar was the giveaway, there. The implant itself was undetectable ceramic and polymer, a fine design, eminently patentable -- but I digress again. With that implant, I would have been able to send my senses beyond the cell, into the skittering agent that even now interprets my chip-code and broadcasts it to its sibling up the production line. I would have _been_ the agents. I trust them completely, as one can only really trust one's creation, but it would have been pleasant to live the plan through them. Ah, well.)

By my calculations, I have three more days of waiting.

The moon will be perfect. The habitat I've designed is seasonless, an eternal mid-spring, and the hydroponic farm pod will feed us without need for a harvest. Treacherous autumn will never again come. I'll never smell a whiff of burning autumn leaves and think of him, falling, and myself helpless. There need be only minimal gravity, never enough to harm us, and even less fire. He will be free of his paraplegia, and I of my memories.

His last letter came yesterday. He says he can't wait, that he loves me still, that we'll rule the moon together. I clutch the letter to me even as I write this final testament to my plan. He's never lost faith in me, even with all the unpleasantness of the trial and the solitary confinement and so forth. Never. (Perhaps he indulges in the belief that I'm under deep cover with the government, somehow, but... nobody is perfect.) I work tirelessly, as ever, to deserve him.

My cell is five floors above the ground, and the concrete is iron-bound, but my plans for the Breakout Agent are exacting and thorough. Any day now, the iron will bend, the concrete will rupture, and my second-finest creation will take me to my finest one, the ship. And my love. And the moon.

How hard it is, some days, to have patience.


End file.
